This spreadsheet above looks at what correlation there is between advertising spend on behalf of a party, and how many votes they got. The first column is the party’s declared advertising (it does not include candidate advertising) and the second column is how the costs of any broadcasting paid for by the Electoral Commission. So the third column is the total advertising spend on behalf of the party, and then divided by the number of votes they cost, what he spend per vote is.

The variation is huge – from 29c a vote to $55 a vote. Take the two extreme minor parties. The Bill and Ben Party got 13,016 votes with under $4,000 of spending. While Social Credit got one tenth as many votes despite spending 20 times as much money.

Most focus will be on the parties that do make it into Parliament, or have a serious chance of doing so. Of those National spent the least per vote – $3.04. So hardly buying your way to power. ACT spent the most at $14.57 a vote, followed by Progressive at $12.80 a vote.

The Greens and NZ First both spent over $10 a vote, two to three times that of Labour and National.

Money is useful in politics. But it is far from a dominant factor. Policies, leadership, media reporting, volunteer effort, membership levels, smart use of IT, MPs behaviour all have (in my opinion) a greater influence on electoral outcomes than merely money spent.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under NZ Politics.
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The Bill and Ben Party got 13,016 votes with under $4,000 of spending. While Social Credit got one tenth as many votes despite spending 20 times as much money.

Much has been said and written about the [Electoral Finance] Bill. In yesterday’s Dom Post a letter to the editor summed it up for many people: Democracy is not “one dollar, one vote”. Annette King, 18 Dec 2007

Correct Annette… spending and votes are not correlated. Voters are smarter than you give them credit for.

When you have a two party state mentality there is no other indicator of success than the failure of the other party.

When NZ has have 3-4 major parties operating in FPP system then we can start wondering what money is doing. The majority of voters aren’t interested in applying any more intellectual energy than it takes to understand a slogan – and who can blame them, they’re out there paying for Labour’s mismanagement right now. (that’s slogan number one )

The Green Party expenditure of $10 per vote is particularly interesting. In this sense, ironically the Green Party provides a classic case study in how the correlation between increased expenditure and increased votes does not seem to exist. After all, the Greens’ expenditure has increased in every election the party has stood in. Here’s how much they say they have spent over time:

There is also some systematic bias in here. Some parties get a lot of donations of time, presumably because their supporters have a lot of spare time, but not much spare money. Other parties get a lot of donations of money that they then use to buy things that otherwise would have been done by volunteers, perhaps because their supporters have a lot of money and not much time.

We generally see donations of money to be perjorative – buying policies etc etc. But that donations of time are somehow positive – we don’t talk about people “buying policies” by putting their time into helping to develop them.

So, arguably, a party like ACT might get a lot of monetary donations but little free time. A party like Labour might get less money donated, but a lot of time donations from unions and the like.

I have no idea how we’d measure this, and what impact it would have on the public’s perception. But it is definitely a systematic bias.

And the Peters party managed to find a Mill to blow. Wonder what lost favours that bought.

It either says much about the current state of our politics or much about my current state of mind (or perhaps both) that I actually spent several seconds wondering “Who is this Mill person to whom gd refers?”.

I see Act rate poorest of the parties in parliament in terms of votes per $ spent.

Of course it would be immature and stupid of me to suggest that this exceptionally poor return on investment is in any way a reflection on the soundness of Act’s radical economic theories, so of course I won’t!

Well that is indeed uncharacteristically prudent of you, for if you had made such an idiotic suggestion I would have had to correct you, and point out that ACT’s traditionally poor showing is as always down to Labour’s sleazy cowardly rat bag media agents who have the gall to pose as objective journalists at the same time as they have waged a decades long campaign to demonise Roger Douglas, Rod Hide and Act.

Did you count the public money spent on TV ads as part of the allocation to political parties? And what about the value of all the free air time given to Labour and National only – such as the Key/Clark exclusive TV debates? What about all the column inches in newspapers devoted to what Labour or National said about things when the smaller parties were also putting out press releases and not being reported?

The $ per vote analysis is actually very misleading. It only counts the $ spend declared, not the value of the exposure given by the media, which arguably is more influential than any spend. I suspect that if National and Labour received exactly the same air time and column inches as other parties their $ per vote would be somewhat different!

freedom101 – why would parties that get much lower vote share get exactly the same column inches? Should the bill and ben party have gotten the same column inches? Was there enough content to fill that many inches?

I’m with OECD. Spending limits aren’t useful. We should keep requiring declaration of donations and declaration of spending, but remove the limits.